Les Démons de Jésus (1997)
Genre : Comedy
Runtime : 1H 57M
Director : Bernie Bonvoisin
Writer : Bernie Bonvoisin
Synopsis
Set in the late 1960s, a family of Gypsies live in a dilapidated pavilion in the western suburbs of Paris.
Nounours is the nickname of a "cousin" an informer with a special arrangement with the police: he gets 10% of the drugs seized thanks to his help. When his personal contact, inspector Maurin, commits suicide, inspector Gérard Delvaux takes over. Meanwhile, judge Lambert is uncovering the illegal practices of the policemen. Her persistent investigations, which had cornered Maurin, are leading to Gérard, and also to Nounours as the source of heroin that led to recent cases of deadly overdoses. Nounours promises Gérard increasingly bigger catches which he is intent on realising before he is forced to reveal who Nounours is to judge Lambert.
A wood worker is trying hard to make his company survive every day... But a fire in his workshop leaves him in a lot of trouble when he realizes his insurer was swindling him - he does not have any insurance... That's when a crazy idea grows in his mind - he will need all his friends and their different talents to make it work...
Jules is a shepherd who lives a humble and solitary life in rural Provence. From time to time, he is visited by a lonely widow, Fine, who longs to be his wife. One day, Jules comes across an unexploded bomb lying on the ground in open countryside. After a few foolhardy attempts to set the bomb off, Jules makes a surprising discovery. It is filled with thousands of bank notes…
Loic and Sophie are siblings living with their mother in a block of flats. The impetuous, promiscuous Loic is a talented photographer about to make it to the big time, but being pulled back by loyalty to his best friend and ex-lover, both junkies. Sophie, a schoolgirl on holidays, is quietly undergoing a sexual awakening, observing from a distance Loic's milieu; she begins an affair with his business partner to Loic's quasi-incestuous disapproval. Loic is spotted by a prominent editor, but becomes increasingly unhinged, by his friend's violent struggles with dealers, by his lover's demands, by Sophie's 'betrayal', by his own 'demons'. Tragedy inevitably strikes.
Stressed and overworked, famous French movie star Michel Blanc is beginning to wear down, physically and mentally, from the pressure and demands of fame. Already in a fragile state of mind, strange events start to transpire all around him, and he gradually loses his grip. Taking the advice of a psychiatrist, Blanc retreats to the countryside with his friend Carole Bouquet, but Blanc still has not managed to escape all of his problems.
The story of a friendship between Francis, Lune et Éric, three enraged angels, linked to life and death through the traumas of their childhood and the street, where they took refuge in their adolescence, emerging on the threshold of adulthood. This is a story of resilience and reconstruction, on the price of violence and the strength of love.
Victor is a legal advisor who finds himself abandoned by his wife and fired the same day. He tries to seek comfort from different friends and family members, but everyone he meets is concerned with their own problems. His morale begins to falter when he realizes that no one cares about him.
The plot is about a trial against three men who tried to earn loads of money by illegal methods to get to Canada and about the lawyers and the judge who get on with the trial and who are being unfaithful to their couples.
On the island of Jersey, off the French coast, Mélanie, a beautiful woman gifted with a captivating personality, enjoys having unimportant love affairs that her husband Victor, a perfumer older than her, seems to endure with total indifference.
Honoré Panisse is dying, cheerfully, with friends, wife, and son at his side. He confesses to the priest in front of his friends; he insists that the doctor be truthful. But, he cannot bring himself to tell his son Césariot that his real father is Marius, the absent son of César, Césariot's godfather. Panisse leaves that to Fanny, the lad's mother. Dissembling that he's off to see a friend, Césariot then seeks Marius, now a mechanic in Toulon. Posing as a journalist, Césariot spends time with Marius and leaves believing tales he is a petty thief. Only after the truth comes out can Marius, Fanny, César, and Césariot step beyond the falsehoods, benign though they may be.
In Paris, Lulu, a passionate policeman, works with the faith of a rookie, despite the sclerotic bureaucracy and the incompetence or negligence of some of his colleagues. In his new position as a narcotics inspector, he tries to keep his sanity as he witnesses the worst of the human condition.
A schoolboy Nicholas always worries about something. When he goes on a school skiing trip, all his visions and nightmares take him over.
Jeanne, a receptionist at a travel agency, is looking for the love of her life. She thinks she has finally found it with Olivier. However, Olivier reveals he has AIDS and disappears from her life after her profession of love and confession of infidelity.
Nelly leaves her lazy, unemployed husband to work for retired judge Mr Arnaud, forty years her senior, after he offers to clear her bills for her. While she types his memoirs the two develop a close friendship, but Arnaud becomes jealous when Nelly begins dating his good-looking young publisher.
César runs a bar along Marseilles' port, assisted by his 23 year old son, Marius. Colorful characters abound: M. Panisse, an aging widower and prosperous sail maker; Honorine, a fishmonger with a sidewalk stall near the bar; her daughter, Fanny, who helps her sell cockles just outside the bar; and various old salts. Friends since childhood, Fanny and Marius love each other, but Marius has a secret wanderlust: every ship's whistle stirs a longing for foreign lands. When M. Panisse seeks Fanny's hand in marriage and when a departing clipper needs a deckhand, Marius and Fanny must decide who and what they love most. César, with his generous, wise spirit, tries to guide his son.
An eccentric family is re-united during the 1968 general strike in France, after the death of the grandmother.
After a life of emotional and professional upsets, Alex finds himself headwaiter in a chic Parisian restaurant. Well into middle age, divorced but still very much a ladies’ man, he has one great ambition: to open an amusement park by the sea. One day, an old flame, Claire, suddenly re-enters his life. For Alex, the fires of love are easily re-kindled, but Claire has another man in her life…
Christmas, family, and infidelity. Yvette's husband has died, and her grown daughters join her at the grave: Sonia, wealthy, bourgeois, and generous; Louba, living with their dad Stanislas, singing at a Russian restaurant, penniless, the mistress for the past 12 years of a man who will never leave his wife; Milla, the youngest, acerbic, lonesome. Christmas was when they learned their parents were divorcing 25 years ago. Over the next few days, yuletide depression, Louba's pregnancy, Sonia's crumbling marriage, Stanislas's overtures to Yvette, and Milla's attraction to the man who's her father's rent-free lodger lead each one to re-examine self, family, and hopes. Is renewal possible?
Husband finds out that his wife is a secret agent and that she has a handsome partner.